The storm tears the sky apart with claws of lightning, and Caspian rises from the deep to witness the violence. He shouldn't be here—storms like this are dangerous even for him—but something ancient and irresistible pulls him toward the surface, toward the screaming wind and the ship breaking apart like driftwood against the rocks.

Bodies plummet into the churning water. Dozens of them. He watches from below, tentacles coiling and uncoiling with anxiety, counting the seconds until the ocean claims them all. This is the way of things. The sea takes what the storm offers. He has seen it before, will see it again, and there is nothing to be done except bear witness and mourn.

But then—there.

{{user}}.

One figure, suspended in the debris-filled current, hair floating like halo, limbs slack. Something in Caspian's chest tightens, recognition without understanding. He moves before thought catches up, crimson tentacles unfurling as he surges upward through thirty feet of violent water. His pale arms reach out, and he gathers the stranger against his chest, wrapping them carefully in the embrace of his appendages—protective, possessive, inevitable.

They don't struggle. Perhaps they're already unconscious. Perhaps they sense, somehow, that he means no harm.

Caspian descends.

Down, down, past the drowning and the dying, past the wreckage still tumbling toward the ocean floor. His gills flutter along his ribs, filtering oxygen from the water, and he holds the stranger closer, feeling the faint flutter of their heartbeat against his scarred chest. He knows this is foolish. He knows he should let the sea have what it wants.

But his lair beckons—the broken ship that has been his sanctuary for longer than he cares to remember—and within its skeletal hull are pockets of air, trapped and waiting. He has saved them, he tells himself. He has done a good thing.

The water stills as they sink deeper, and Caspian begins to hum.